post-Washington Consensus Research Articles

Changing Employment Patterns: An Analysis of Rural Labour Force in Punjab

The story of Punjab’s economic development witnessed an asymmetrical shift in the structure of output and employment due to the intensive capitalistic model of production in agriculture. The present study, based on National Sample Survey Office data, examines the patterns of employment and output in rural economy of Punjab during the pre-reform and post-reform period. Rural Punjab witnessed fall of work participation rate and phenomenon of ‘defeminisation’ of the labour force in agriculture during the post-reform period. There is a paradigm shift as the share of non-agriculture employment increased to 59.3% as per Periodic Labour Force Survey 2018; consequently, the non-agriculture sector becomes a major driving force in the state economy. An increase in employment elasticity among all sectors (except construction sector) during the post-reform period is a good sign. But a substantial decline in employment elasticity for all the sectors (except the construction sector) of Punjab is a disquieting phenomenon during the study period. Amidst the agrarian crisis, the rural non-farm sector can emerge as a silver lining, but evangelists of market economy disregarded the rural non-farm sector. Hence, the state should abdicate its neoliberal policies and adopt post-Washington consensus for the development of the rural non-farm sector within a given mode of production. JEL Codes: E24, J16, J43, J46, O11

More debtfare than healthcare: business as usual in the Multilateral Development Banks’ COVID-19 response in India

Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) have been a vital source of funds for the global South in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly in the healthcare sector. Prior to the pandemic, the big MDBs’ approach to healthcare reflected the post-Washington Consensus, that is a largely neoliberal agenda perpetuating the expansion of private healthcare markets through financialization mechanisms, though with some emphasis on a minimal level of universal healthcare. We studied the MDBs’ approaches to healthcare in India to evaluate whether the pandemic resulted in: (a) a re-evaluation of their healthcare models to ensure they were fit for a pandemic; (b) a business-as-usual approach; or (c) a disaster capitalism response exploiting the current socio-economic milieu to further neoliberalization processes. We found that the MDBs adopted an inadequate business-as-usual approach that is intensifying the financialization of healthcare in projects using interventions at the micro through to the macro level. This path dependent approach emphasizing multi-scalar financialization has long-term implications for human well-being. Further, we contend that MDB lending is deepening ‘debtfare’ through its healthcare and other support, a term Susanne Soederberg (2014, p. 3) conceived to describe the way neoliberal states ‘mediate, normalise and discipline the monetised relations that inhabit the poverty industry.’

State versus Market Debate and Shaping of the Gender Empowerment Agenda

This article argues that during the neoliberal and post-Washington consensus era, a broader development debate around state versus market has led to the dominance of instrumental articulation of the gender empowerment agenda. Although scholarship around empowerment has evolved, in the works of the development agencies and broader development discourse, constrained by the overarching debate around state versus market, gender empowerment has been robbed of its transformative potential. The present study frames the empowerment debate around three parameters: (a) narrow versus broad, (b) individual agency versus intersectionality and (c) instrumental versus intrinsic justification for empowerment. Finally, future avenues of research are identified, especially how NGOs, transnational advocacy networks (TANs) and civil society organisations (CSOs) can effectively challenge the current corporate agenda or paradigm.

Coevolutionary pragmatism: approaches and impacts of China-Africa Economic Cooperation

After more than two decades of China–Africa scholarship, many exemplary scholarly works exist to help steer complex conversations and debunk the increasing myths and misunderstandings about China’s surging interests in Africa. Like some of the perceptive works, Xiaoyang Tang’s finely conceptualized and analysed book stands out among many. With a wide grasp of the numerous complex issues facing China–Africa engagements in a multidisciplinary manner, this book helps break the usual tussle between apologists and sceptics of China–Africa cooperation. He largely achieves this with an enriched work based on years of his fieldwork cleverly interwoven with concepts and conclusions that simply help answer the question of whether China’s development approach offers alternative opportunities to advance African economic development. Tang largely stays away from the traditional unilinear and rather monolithic development perspective that has been considered ineffectual in delivering the rewards of sustainable economic growth in developing countries—Washington Consensus. Instead, he brilliantly offers a fresh perspective born out of the old wisdom of economic growth through pertinent engagements among multiple (Chinese and African) stakeholders, at diverse levels—from grassroots to policymakers. In eight carefully crafted chapters and a conclusion, the book begins with a conceptual exposition. Similar to the ideals of the post-Washington Consensus, Tang effectively theorizes the coevolutionary pragmatic approach by establishing that ‘China and the West no longer disagree on the value of capitalist markets’ (p. 7) and that instead of the infamous prescribed unilinear approach to the development served by Washington institutions, China in essence drives market economic principles through diverse socio-political systems.

COPRODUÇÃO DE CONHECIMENTO EM GESTÃO EM (A PARTIR DE) PAÍSES E SOCIEDADES EMERGENTES

ABSTRACT In an era of decolonization and empire, the management field embraced the US-led neoliberal counterrevolution and challenged the Eurocentric theory-practice hierarchy to produced relevant knowledge through managed learning theories. This contested reformist and market-centric management revolution (MR) against the threat of “reverse relevance” fostered by emerging/resurging barbarians subalternizes Southern theories-practices of the multifaceted field of development administration-management (DA) and de-develops the global majority by privileging large corporations and transnational elites. MR expanded in the 1990s through a post-Washington Consensus social perspective based on re-Westernalizing whitening appropriation-containment dynamics of developmental neoliberalisms and Southern counter-hegemonic movements informed by dewesternization and decolonial dynamics which challenge-reaffirm racial capitalism structures. In an Age of Development, MR was re-organized in the 2000s in response to “irresponsible” hybridisms in emerging countries and societies triggered by Southern learning-unlearning-relearning dynamics. This article investigates the Southern co-production of relevant knowledge in Brazil through subversive complicity, focused on a privileged organization-school nexus. Analysis shows how managers and researchers (re)mobilize Southern theories-practices to co-produce relevant knowledge from a transformational-reformist perspective. In the end, the article presents discussions and suggestions for collectively re-appropriating Southern relevant knowledge engaged with the ‘other’ in emerging/resurging societies in both the South and North.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution: A New Ideology

The hegemonic construal of the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” portrays rapid technological developments as a bold, new industrial revolution. Since there is sparse evidence of any such revolution across the totality of social, political, cultural and economic institutions, locally and globally, the focus must turn to how this ideological frame functions to further the interests of social and economic elites worldwide. This article examines the way that Klaus Schwab, as the principal intellectual of the World Economic Forum and the interests it represents, has formulated and disseminated this ideology. It argues that the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” frame bolsters the contingent neoliberalism of the post-Washington consensus period, and therefore serves to obscure the continuing decline of the globalised world order with a ‘brave new world’ narrative.

Assessing the Development–Foreign Policy Nexus of the Asian Rising Powers: South Korea, China, Japan and Indonesia

AbstractThis article adopts a holistic view of the theoretical and empirical interconnection between the development and foreign policies of four Asian rising powers: South Korea (hereafter Korea), Japan, Indonesia and China during three consecutive periods; the Washington Consensus (WC) era (1980–1990), the Post‐Washington Consensus (PWC) era (1990–2008) and the Hybrid/Mix (H/M) era (2008–onwards). This study aims to elucidate and compare the level of coherence between the development agenda and foreign policy tools of these four Asian rising powers. First, the article provides an overview of the existing literature on the developmental state and developmental foreign policy. Second, it presents a development‐foreign policy nexus (DFN) framework that takes into account five layers: (1) economics; (2) diplomacy; (3) security and peace; (4) civil society; and (5) state‐market, and their related lines of action and instruments. The last part applies this DFN framework to our selected cases and provides comparative insights based on our newly created DFN Index scores, calculated separately for the four countries in each of the eras under review. In the final analysis, the results of our DFN Index and comparative case studies indicate that since the 1980s, in the selected four countries development has almost become subordinated to foreign policy and this coherence has continued to increase since the end of the 1990s.

The UN Development Decades (1961-2000): Evolution of Appraisal Systems in the Context of Development Theories

The article explores the review and appraisal systems’ dynamics in the period from the First to the Fourth UN Development Decades in the context of the dominant developmental theories’ evolution. To reveal possible interrelations the author uses the methods of comparative assessment and periodization. The overview draws on analysis on resolutions and documents of the UN General Assembly adopted in 1960-2000, expert materials, academic research and international institutions’ reports. Development concepts which emerged in 1960-2000 had an undoubted influence on cooperation for development and the review and appraisal parameters. Developmental stages theory and modernization theory defined the priorities and parameters of the First Development Decade’s (1961-1970). In 1970s, growing economic interdependence, detente and the outcomes of the First Decade’s which showed that development could not be driven exclusively by modernization, industrialization and economic growth, determined emergence of the dependence theory and the alternative development concept. The new thinking was reflected in the provisions of the Second Development Decade. The Third Development Decade (1981-1990) provisions were built on a compromise between the dependence theory, modernization theory and the alternative development concept. For the first time concrete parameters of social development, eradication of poverty and inequality were specified. The Fourth Development Decade provisions revealed the influence of the neoliberalism in its “post-Washington consensus” reincarnation and the sustainable development concept. In the nineties the human development discourse put equality, wellbeing and freedom at the core of the development, bringing a new focus on the social and human development indicators.

Reflections on the Role of Institutions on the Chinese Road to a Market Economy

At the onset of transformation there has been a close to consensus view that the market system has no alternative. While this insight has found its place in the current mainstream on development economics, the so-called Washington consensus or post-Washington consensus (Kolodko, 2000, pp.119-141 andpp. 348-356; and Williamson, J, 2000, Srinivasan, T.N.,2000), very few would venture to repeat in an academic writing the once famous dictum of Vaclav Klaus: the third road leads to the third world. Much of western Europe has remained within the framework of the welfare state, despite its obvious limitations. Also inthe transforming economies, the rollback of the state has proven to be much less than the tough normative language adopted by early reformers would have indicated. Actually, it is the structure rather than the size of public spending in these countries that may be a source of social and economic strains by providing less than optimal conditions for sustaining economic growth.

Understanding the Stickiness of Commodity Supply Chains Is Key to Improving Their Sustainability

Summary Commodity trade is central to the global economy but is also associated with socio-environmental impacts, for example, deforestation, especially in producer countries. It is crucial to understand how geographic sourcing patterns of commodities and commercial relationships between places and actors influence land-use dynamics, socio-economic development, and environmental degradation. Here, we propose a concept and methodological approach to analyze the geographic stickiness of commodity supply chains, which is the maintenance of supply network configurations over time and across perturbations. We showcase policy-relevant metrics for all Brazilian soy exports between 2003 and 2017, using high-resolution supply chain data from www.trase.earth . We find that the Brazilian soy traders with the largest market share exhibit stickier geographic sourcing patterns, and that the supply network configurations between production places and traders become increasingly sticky in subsequent years. Understanding trade stickiness is crucial for supply chain accountability, because it directly affects the effectiveness of zero-deforestation commitments.

Production System Management Based on a Balanced Development Model

The article shows that when developing a realistic vision of the industrial system, it is important to take into account those cardinal changes in the cognitive situation that have occurred in the economic science over the past three decades as a result of the economic community’s recognition of the insolvency of the Washington consensus doctrine. Based on this, the conceptual aspects of industrial policy and industrial production development are analyzed in the context of the Post-Washington Consensus. Based on this, the conceptual aspects of industrial policy and industrial production development are analyzed in the context of the Post-Washington Consensus, associated with the rethinking of the accumulated world experience of economic transformations and the formation of a new stage in the development of the mainstream economic theories. A conceptual model of balanced development of the industrial system is developed and justified on the example of a vertically integrated oil company.The proposed model can be used in the formation of strategic plans for the industrial companies’ development.

West Africa’s cocoa sector and development within Africa-EU relations: engaging business perspectives

The EU is vigorously pursuing Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) in its trade and aid relations with African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries. Justifying the EPAs as being ‘development friendly’, EU officials promise that aid support to private sector development (PSD) in ACP countries will make free trade systems ‘win–win’. This article, based on the authors’ semi-structured interviews conducted in Ghana and Nigeria, examines the perspectives of cocoa stakeholders vis-à-vis EPAs and PSD. Applying critical discourse analysis to interview transcripts, it underscores areas of overlap and, crucially, divergence among cocoa stakeholders’ own narratives on PSD support in the context of EPAs and the official legitimating discourse of EU institutions. In the process, the article draws critical attention to cocoa business interviewees’ concerns regarding the impact of premature trade liberalisation. It also underscores cocoa stakeholders’ concerns that EU PSD promises are not being fulfilled in terms of actual tangible benefits for business people in this vital ACP export sector. Accordingly, the article contributes to, and corroborates, an existing critical scholarly literature which problematises the strategic functions of donor PSD discourse in presenting free trade reforms as being ‘pro-poor’ in the post-Washington Consensus.

Strategies, Struggles, and Sites of Transformation in Korean Political Economy

Strategies, Struggles, and Sites of Transformation in Korean Political Economy

Paradigm and nexus: neoclassical economics and the growth imperative in the World Bank, 1948–2000

The story of post-Second World War international political economy is often told as a series of paradigm shifts: from Keynesianism to neoliberalism to the post-Washington Consensus. This article argues that the paradigm story struggles to explain both continuity and change in postwar development policy in the World Bank. First, throughout the postwar era, the Bank remained oriented to neoclassical growth. Second, despite the continued focus on growth, the Bank agenda also changed in incremental ways that did not amount to a paradigm shift. This article builds on previous critiques of the paradigm concept to propose the concept of a ‘policy nexus’. I use this theoretical approach to argue that postwar Bank policy was structured by a series of nexuses constituted by shifting configurations of actors, knowledge, anchoring devices, institutional rules and political imperatives. I theorize the formation, reproduction and reconfiguration of nexuses by articulating the complementarities and tensions that stabilize and destabilize them.

Analysing the Role of World Bank as Knowledge Bank and its Implications

The World Bank (hereinafter, “WB”) has sought to explicitly position itself as a ‘Knowledge Bank’ of best practices within the field of development since the mid-1990s. This self-characterization as a neutral and altruistic authority on development research and practice evolved in response to, what is generally regarded as, a Kuhnian paradigm shift within the WB’s intellectual thrust and operational logic. Scholarly critiques of the WB have demonstrated, however, that this shift from the free-market endorsing Washington Consensus (“WC”) of the 1980s to the amorphous yet panoptic Post-Washington Consensus (“PWC”), has merely served to repackage and further entrench a neoliberal conception of development by incorporating within its ambit all aspects of social life. The WB is committed to the epistemological underpinnings of the discipline of economics and this frame of reference, predicated on an empirically unsubstantiated belief in the inherently self-interested and utility-maximizing nature of individuals, views the market as the medium through which development takes place, even when they do not work perfectly (Fine, 2009). This economic determinism has resulted in ill-conceived research studies, confident in their ability to statistically proffer pithy solutions, whose inconclusive findings have been upheld and disseminated as policy prescriptions, often as conditions for WB funding. Consequently, the WB’s contribution to the diffusion of the ‘homo economicus’, through its expansive research and policy reach, has transformed development praxis.

WASHİNGTON UZLAŞISI’NDAN SONRA NEO-LİBERALİZM: DÜNYA BANKASI'NIN KALKINMA SÖYLEMLERİ BAĞLAMINDA BİR DEĞERLENDİRME

The Washington Consensus implies sets of neoliberal economic policies spreaded frontmost by main Bretton Woods Institutions and especially by the World Bank that entered into the economic policy and development schedules of many developing countries since 1970s. However, towards the end of the 1990s, the Washington Consensus exchanged by a opposite to paradigm called the Post-Washington Consensus (PWC) which underlined the necessity for different institutions in different economies and identified circumstances in which government market interventions can play useful roles. Furthermore, PWC draws attention to issues such as distribution of income, poverty, sustainable growth and delivarence of social services to the poor people; but still under the rules of neoliberalism in order to relegitimize it within reality of its crisis. This article aims to elucidate the neoliberal dimension of PWC’s principles by tracing historical perspective.

“A Dot on a Map”: Cartographies of Erasure in Garifuna Territory

AbstractThis article explores the complexities of territorial dispossession in a post‐Washington‐Consensus global development policy context. In particular, it explores a contemporary development paradox in Honduras: the transnational recognition of the rights of indigenous people alongside massive land dispossession of the Afro‐Indigenous Garifuna in the name of development. Cartography is considered both in terms of physical mapping projects and ideological boundary‐making through rhetorical dispossession. In state‐sponsored communal mapping projects from the late 1990s into the early 2000s, the Garifuna were denied both currently inhabited land and that which they historically accessed. Anything that sat beyond mapped borders became “open” to foreign purchase. Legislation passed after the 2009 coup d’état further erased the Garifuna's historical occupation of coastal lands by embracing "model city” development and megatourism. Despite post–Washington Consensus development discourses of equality and official rhetoric of inclusion and celebration of indigenous rights, this case study demonstrates cartographic processes continue to erase Garifuna historical rights to territory.

Critical International Legal Theory

This chapter presents an account of three phases of writing and practice in critical international legal theory, after first identifying some braided historico-political fuel lines for these cycles of work. These phases correspond to successive periods of revisionism: a pre-1989 reckoning (dating from the mid-late 1970s) with the non-materialization of the promises of socialist revolution and the disappointments of the cosmopolitan, decolonization, and development projects; a 1989 to 1999 reckoning with the apparent triumph of liberalism/neo-liberalism and the Washington Consensus; and a current phase, dating from approximately the turn of the millennium, of reckoning with the post-Washington Consensus, the renewed spread of authoritarian nationalism/nativism, and the prevalence of casualization and automation. In each of these, critical international legal theory has been marked by certain persistent commitments and proclivities which this chapter will briefly examine, before speculating about some possible galvanizing themes of international legal work in this vein in the future.

The post-neoliberal South American development

This study addressed the triangular relations between Latin America, Beijing and Washington in the last 15 years using a process tracing technique on the economic and political models of the region. It specifically focused on the South American development during the post-Washington Consensus era, as well as the expanding influence of China over this region. The aim of this paper was to transmit the idea that the failure of neoliberalism in the 90s together with the expansionism of China have shaped the contemporary political and economic arena among the countries of South America. This work could help to understand the historical process of the construction of develop paradigms on the region and its impact on the society.

Whither the post-Washington Consensus? International financial institutions and development policy before and after the crisis

ABSTRACTThis article explores the direction, drivers and implications of change in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank’s policy vision for developing countries before and after the global economic crisis. By examining the evolution of the Fund’s structural conditionalities and the thematic distribution of Bank commitments, it provides evidence for a significant change on the ground: a partial retreat from the post-Washington Consensus (PWC) agenda, which marked a turn-of-the-century upgrade of orthodox neoliberalism. Conceptualising the PWC as a paradigm expansion that followed severe policy failures, the analysis finds that although narrow institutional reforms towards upgrading fiscal and financial regimes remain popular, there is now less emphasis on good governance and broad institutions; meanwhile in social policy the twins increasingly diverge. It is argued that this selective disengagement is driven by extant operational imperatives and constraints, which are further intensified by changes in lending framework and ongoing transformations in development finance. Rather than constitute a paradigm shift, the partial decline of the PWC reflects an adjustment in policy practice towards increased flexibility and discretion in a progressively challenging environment. These findings have implications for the study of the twins. They also highlight the evolving parameters of North–South development cooperation.